Stroboscopy

Means to look at something using strobe rather than continuous illumination. At BVI, we use strobe light to allow apparent slow motion videodocumentation of the vibration of the vocal folds. Middle C on the piano is the pitch one hears when the vocal folds vibrate at 252 [intlink id=”212″ type=”post”]hertz[/intlink], or cycles, per second. Under ordinary illumination, the vocal folds are a blur due to the rapidity of vibration. Under a common setting for the stroboscope, the vocal folds appear to be vibrating at 2 cycles per second, regardless of the actual rate of vibration, so that vibratory dynamics may be understood.